We have been extremely frustrated by our OpenCart experience. We're not the only ones... there are many bad reviews of OpenCart for many different reasons and I'll explain them a bit here.

OpenCart is an open source e-commerce platform written in PHP and is based on the MVC platform. The code is clean and written in a way that is easy to modify and understand. Overall, it's a pretty good e-Commerce system and if you know your way around LAMP technology you can modify it nicely to suit your needs. Of the other open source systems we have tried, it's the cleanest and uses the least amount of files overall.

So that's the good about it. We'll let you know our complaints about the software itself in a bit, but what gets us the most is the OpenCart team. As far as we know, there are two main OpenCart contributors... one is Daniel, who recently moved to China and is the OpenCart founder. The other is someone who goes by "Qphoria" on the OpenCart forums, who seems to be one of Daniel's chosen ones to release updates to the software. Qphoria is also a moderator on the forums along with a couple of other guys.

Here are a few reasons why we take back our recommendation of using OpenCart for client sites. First, if you post a question in their forums, be prepared to not receive an answer. In fact, most of the answers are standard canned, and very derogatory. Qphoria along with the other moderators look down on people and even say things like "Why do I bother writing the readme if no one is going to read it". The problem is the readme doesn't include information some people are asking. If it's a true bug, sometimes your thread will get deleted, sometimes it will get locked, and no explanation is given. The forums and the moderators are a mess.

When Qphoria releases updates, the readme many times says that templates are not affected by certain updates. However, the update patch usually contains default template changes. Not only that, but the problem with this, is that if you have a custom template, you need to be very careful because the template changes go to the default folder, not the custom folder. In other words, if you have template changes your updates end up being very cumbersome and time consuming.

Daniel must have a lot going on. He constantly sets dates or gives time frames for when versions will be launched, but those days come and go. Sure, it's free, and what can you expect, but with attitudes like this, they can't expect us to use their platform on client sites. When we give clients expectations, and set deadlines, it's impossible to coordinate this with OpenCart since they only have empty promises. For example, OpenCart 1.5 was promised about 6 months ago, and every 2 weeks there is a new promise to when it will be delivered. Still we wait.

Unlike other platforms, we don't know when the next patch will be released either. Qphoria just released OpenCart 1.4.9.4 and has already started talking about 1.4.9.5. When you ask him when 1.4.9.5 is scheduled, so you can plan it around your clients, he says, in a very abrupt way "it'll be released when it's released". However, most of the time he won't even answer.

These releases have gotten so bad, there is a thread on the OpenCart forum called "Conspiracy Theories". Sad.

So how does OpenCart makes it's money? From add ons. When someone releases an add on into the OpenCart community, and charges for it, Daniel takes a 20% commission. Many of the add ons won't work with 1.5, so people would need to likely re-purchase any add ons that they bought when using 1.4.x.

Another problem is if you have a store on 1.4.x, and want to upgrade to 1.5, the team has already said that most all custom templates won't work, and also your product options won't carry over. Have fun either manually creating your options all over again, or pay for some custom script to move your old options over. What a mess.

At this point, we have started to play with PrestaShop, and there's more of a learning curve with it, but at least their team is much more in tune with their user base. TomatoCart also looks interesting.

If you want to use OpenCart, stick with 1.4.9.4, and don't give your clients any expectations on new features. When 1.5 comes out, it's going to be a RC release any way, so it's going to go through many rounds of bug testing. I'd stay way from OpenCart until at least 1.5.1.

My recommendation to Daniel:

1) Start a timeline, and stick to it. Give your user base a good release schedule. Your user base is losing faith and jumping ship.
2) Tell your moderators to be more gentle with their users, and if not, fire them. Are they doing this because they love it, or because they have to? They're acting like it's because of the latter.
3) Don't be so defensive. There are many posts of you attacking the poster for giving their opinion. This really looks negatively upon you.
4) Both you and your moderators act like the world owes you a favor. We were just fine without OpenCart and we'll be just fine without it. Don't give us a reason to all bail ship.

Your mileage may vary with OpenCart, but my frustration level is pretty high. Daniel promises that things will get better with OpenCart, but so far none of us have any reason to believe it.

As a brand new opencart user I see a lot of potential. But even though it free and opensource…. if you look at any successful open source project, they care about their reputation. It seems like opencart does not and neither do they respect their users. The 2 person dev team doesn’t exactly inspire confidence either… plain and simple, if opencart wants to survive they better get a little more organized, accountable & transparent.

I must say, this is the first review where I’ve been labeled as the bad guy. Truth be told, as the community gets larger and the questions get more repetitive, I do tend to lose my patience more and more. The simple fact is that we are failing to express the points clear enough. All the information is there and when I say “why do I bother making readme’s when people don’t read them” … I’m not wrong. I get 10 emails a day asking about the same stuff that IS in the readme. My struggle is figuring a way to get the message to people and make them see something we are obviously not writing bold enough.

That said, please understand that we are a 2 man dev team and we work on an open source project …. i.e. FREE. We try to do what we can with the time we have. Many people complain that a 2 man team is a problem but fail to look at other projects. ZenCart is a 4 man team. 2 that do actual coding, 1 that does graphics and one that does forum moderation. Not to say they are winning any awards lately. But a smaller team shouldn’t reflect poorly. Granted OpenCart could be split up better to put 1 person in control of modules, 1 person in control of shipping, etc. Typically people who complain about the team size tend to lack the real experience of working on a coding team. Adding more people just puts more hands in the cookie jar and causes more conflicts.

It is no secret that we don’t fully have our design process in order, this comes down to stubbornness from the devs which is another point of why not to add more of them. But like any project, we all have our pros and cons. Planning is our weak point and that causes frustration in the community which then causes frustration back from us for people who complain. We will learn from our mistakes and keep 1.6 completely silent.

Still, you need to understand that constant complaining gets mixed in with actual ignorance of users as well. The documentation is lax for the main cart, but when people don’t read the readme.txt files that come with the software, it gets to a point where even the most mild mannered person can finally snap.

Feedback on how to help make it easier for people to see the readme file when opening the zip would be a better use of your time than this blog tbh.

From my own point of view, I’ve found the readme files (which yes I’ve read) and the “documentation” on the website not helpful. I can’t even find a simple explanation of what all the various options in the settings do, and half the time the paths given to make changes are simply wrong. A wiki for documentation might help us all to fill in the considerable blanks to sort out the mess – I really don’t want to spend my life trawling through forums with no real answer “never mind, I got it working” is great for the original poster but no help to the rest of us that follow.

New releases either say no template changes or fail to mention it – and then I find out that there are template changes, and to be honest, they’re “code tidy” changes which just break things for me with no additional benefit to be seen.

Also, a lot of the modules that are free *should* be added to the main cart for the major releases – why do I have to go and install an additional module to export/import a csv file? Is there anyone who hasn’t done this?

Daniel and qphoria have done a great job so far, but honestly guys – you need to let go a little and let the community do things like documentation and also embrace what the community is saying. In my opinion any question on the forums of “how do I” should be answered in documentation as a matter of priority – links should be to the documents, not to other forum posts!

I would like to say I have only been using my opencart for 2 weeks, I have used many other platforms and packages, and although scary at first I ventured into the world of opencart, everyone has helped me, maybe its the way we approach people to the response we get back, I have tweaked and played around with my opencart, I have a custom template, and other modules attached, and as more and more are now making the add-ons in VQMod, it does make life a lot easier, I love my site, and I have got all the things I need and only spent $20 on one module, which is the colour picker, all the rest were free, and most went and worked no problem, only 1 did I have to tweak and that was the image viewer, but I love my opencart and would like to say thanks for actually giving something for FREE that works, how many things in live are FREE these days!!!!

First of all, stop calling OpenCart “free,” because the add-ons usually (though not in all cases) cost money. And that’s okay, but please don’t whine about how overworked you are, catering to the questions that come from the users, because after the add-ons, the sales of which you and your buddy take twenty-percent, OpenCart does indeed cost money. And again, that’s okay, but you fail to realize that these people are actually your paying customers. If I buy an add-on for one-hundred dollars, you guys get twenty dollars, so this makes me your customer, albeit indirectly.

You and Daniel have a nasty habit of censoring and even banning those whom you deem to be a threat to your vested interests in OpenCart. Your forum isn’t a “community.” it’s a place where people offer assistance in making OpenCart a more useful product, and woe to the person who offers suggestions that, either directly or indirectly, either point out the severe shortcomings of OpenCart, or offer instructions that amount to basic system modifications, or upstage your image as the “expert.”

You and daniel are, in my opinion, incurable. Being determines consciousness.

Reading this blog it strikes me that it is a tunnel vision blog. Written from one side or angel if you want and only to point out any negative thing to be said about Opencart.

Not only this post but any post regarding OpenCart you have written has a negative atmosphere, and you just started to write about OpenCart….. 1 month ago.
And the only thing you wrote about is…. OpenCart. OK, something about Paling and WordPress but what does that mean?
Your refer to “we” when writing about OpenCart, who are “we” and who are you?

I wonder what you will write about osCommerce (still no stable v3 after 6 years). Or PrestaShop, still buggy and bloated even with the 1.4 release.

Looking at this whole blog website it soul purpose is the be negative about Opencart. Why is the home button pointing the a negative post about Daniel when we all know that this has been discussed more then 6 months ago on a much more interesting site then yours. The same goes for the so called vulnerability’s you discuss.

We have a say in The Netherlands “oude koeien uit de sloot halen” and that is all you do.

Being a moderator, I’d see why you’d take my posts so close to heart. My intention wasn’t to slander OpenCart, but rather warn others who devote time and energy into setting up their stores only to get the same frustration I went through. Once 1.5 comes out, I’m sure I’ll talk about how things improve. Daniel has always said things will be different after 1.5, and I hope he sticks to it.

Interesting post but I think people keep forgetting this is Free software and not to expect ANYTHING from it, anything you do get is a bonus.

The code is clean and simple and I hope other projects start to follow this example in the future.

The updates can get annoying when one update completely brakes from the last, this is one thing they have said they don’t want to do, I.E 1.5.1 will work with everything all the way to 1.5.9 but we can only wait and see.

As for the forums, once again this is a FREE resource that people are donating their time towards, there are partners who offer paid support if you want to use one of them for a reliable source of support.

It seems your making money from the opencart project (or at least was) by using it for clients websites, not sure what that says about you, using it to make money yet expecting everyone else work for free and help everyone out. Maybe you could stick around on the forum and help people out? That will help with the support side of things.

It’s free software, but make no doubt about it, Daniel is doing this to make money – just like any other business. He will either sell the product later to another company, or just make money from mods and themes. It’s one thing to be doing it for fun, and another to make a full open source project out of it where you want people to use it.

I have finished several sites using opencart. Indeed there are something could be optimised. But I believe opensource doesn’t mean that you use other people’s code and doesn’t do anything about it, is it? You use your own skill, pick the right code for yourself and customise it.

The structure of opencart is very simple and the code is really clean. Maybe this is not the one you should chose, but it’s definitely something I will continue to use.

@websynn, I bet you Daniel wasn’t thinking about making money at first, thats why OpenCart is free and not commercial, I bet you that money that Daniel gets is the last thing on his mind! and you know why I know that? because OpenCart is free? duh? and do you know why Daniel is making money? BECAUSE PEOPLE APRICIATE HIS HARD WORK! websynn can you tell me if you actually used OpenCart and for how long? because what I have read, you are a bit stupid mate.. think…

If you think that Daniel thinks of money last when working on OpenCart then you are a complete fool. Why are you such a Daniel follower? You think he cares about you? Try to be objective and not so on the bandwagon. I have used OpenCart since last June.

LOL. xNeO is so deep on the Daniel bandwagon that I doubt you could knock him off with a sledgehammer.

I’m sure money is now one of the driving factors behind OpenCart. Daniel is getting commissions off of extension store sales, ad revenue from his website, and i’m sure professional fees from any consultation work he does. I’m sure he no longer just develops it to flex his coding muscles to the rest of the community.

Opencart has its ups and downs, but is still a valuable tool to anyone who is looking for a free, simple solution to their eCommerce needs.

It is open-source, everyone is on the same page at all times. If a known issue surfaces, everyone is effected (even the owner and admins who utilize the software.) It sounds like the guy wanted to sell his services and used bad selling tactics to try and force a resolution to the software. When you use those types of techniques anyone’s reaction is to be resistant and unwilling to even listen. The problem eventually was solved, while taking how ever many times it takes – its fixed… move on..

My feeling, no one has the right to complain about something free – if they don’t like it – move on. You obviously sell your services to clients making profit of something free. Don’t promise things until you see them…? As an engineer, I could talk about all the gadgets on my table – but why would I? My clients will never see them until they are done – fully.

Don’t blame others for your problems if you profit from it… They are your clients you contracted with free software – Find a bug that they won’t fix? Pay someone to do it. Otherwise – deal with it until they can get around to it or another user posts a solution.

Daniel or Q, have no obligation to answer a post, or fix a bug; but they do. They may not get to of the hundred noobie posts – but they get to the ones that count. So they are angry typers – many programmers are…

Maybe Opencart just needs a PR team, and someone to be the link between the dev team and the users. But they are in no way a shopping cart you should not use. I’ve made my company a lot of money using their free software at optimal overhead rates. We are one of the top shopping carts in our specific industry.

Daniel or Q do have an obligation to answer a post or fix a bug. If the obligation isn’t to the end user, it’s at least to themselves… it’s their product, and they do make money from it, even if the initial software is released free.

I had always used osCommerce as our open source ecommerce solution, but got frustrated with the amount of time necessary to keep patching the sites from hackers. I did some research on other alternatives and found OpenCart. I used it for a project and was in awe with how much more it made sense and now use it exclusively.

I started using OpenCart many many versions ago for client websites, at first I was really impressed by its clean coding practices (in relation to the PHP and not the HTML, way too many inline styles!) and how easy it was to modify. I written a free tags module for it, before it implemented tags into the core. Everything was going swell.

Then I noticed something that worried me, I noticed a pretty bad vulnerability in the way it processed PayPal IPN’s, it didn’t verify the POST-back came from PayPal. So I posted my concerns on the forums. Qphoria actually replied pretty quickly, but seemed to play it down/dismiss it. So I patched my client websites and then wrote a little script to exploit the PayPal vulnerability against Qphoria’s own web store. The exploit ran as expected and I had purchased my item for free.

I started writing about what I had done on the forums and to my surprise I found myself banned when I come to submit the post (Qphoria obviously set his orders to manual verification and had noticed the suspicious transaction). So I emailed Qphoria and explained everything. My ban was lifted and the post posted.

I was surprised at some of the responses to my post on this issue. No one seemed to take security seriously, though some questionable patch ideas were submitted. Eventually the core was patched.

After seeing the way people responded to the security flaw I didn’t think it wise to continue using the software and haven’t since that day. In all fairness though, I haven’t found another OS store that is as easy to modify.

It’s a shame that the software is let down by the developers. They need to sit down and figure out the best way to solve these issues together.

Thanks for your story. I believe security is very important, that is why I am studying about this, its a shame that I am not a coder so I can actually see the coding for myself. Hope there is more posts from you to help with the security.

Thanks for your story, I am sure there is a lot of people out there doesn’t want their transaction unsecure (meaning losting money!!!).

I recently completed a project for a client that involved a complete store design from PSD to the Open Cart framework and then other custom modifications to fit their needs. We came to a part within the project where they had requested a custom shipping feature that we found to be available as an extension. We asked our client to purchase this $15 extension and we’d configure it.

Anyhow as clients are sometimes confused or tripped up by simple things, our client said they weren’t able to purchase the extension because they didn’t have a license.

So we wrote to OpenCart through their contact page, please keep in mind this was our FIRST time to ever communicate with anyone from OpenCart.

I’ll page our email written to OpenCart and I’ll paste the unpleasant response from Daniel Kerr:

I’ve recently setup a Open Cart store for a client using one of the free
downloads and they are interested in purchasing an extension for order
tracking, it was only $15 – however he says that he’s unable to purchase it
because he doesn’t have a license.

you have not provided me with decent information what you are talking about.
you have not sent one link. I don’t if your talking about the opencart site
or your own.l if its your own its not a demo is it!

I don’t have time to play guessing games.

———————————————–

I was shocked to say the least, I felt frustrated and most of all, I felt that I had led my client in the wrong direction by suggesting the use of OpenCart. I’ve been a big supporter of OSCommerce, CRELoaded and Interspires carts, I’ve written many contributions and spent thousands of hours customizing clients carts on those platforms, but because OSCommerce isn’t as nice as many of the other options out there, I figured I’d start heading in the direction of something nice and new.

Like many others, I was attracted to the clean code and features of OpenCart, but as many of us have found, that means absolutely NOTHING if there isn’t a good person behind it. Daniel Kerr seems to be irritated by simple questions and that’s a big turn off.

I do not recommend OpenCart and I will not be using it again for any future projects. If Daniel Kerr isn’t a people person or doesn’t have the social skills to interact with people in a nice way, he should consider searching for someone with those skills to represent his product. If their support was better and they actually talked to people in a respectable way, they’d have a great future ahead of them.

Wow, I am new to online shopping world, but doing my best to figure it out. I have found this to be quite an interesting read. My webhost recommended I use shopping cart and I can honestly say I am having difficulties figuring it out. I am no techie by any means and had told my host that. I have searched the forum but there isn’t much help in respect to “opencart for dummies”.
I did find a manual online, which I thought was interesting, it advertises as free, yet you must pay $19.99. I am reluctant to purchase it though, as I have wasted money on ebooks in the past that have been nothing more than junk.
That being said I am sitting on the fence between paying for shopperpress or continuing to try and figure out opencart. Has anyone used shopperpress? I am thinking with them they should be able to help pretty well, as there are live chat personnel, to answer your questions. I mean I could spend $59 for shopperpress or $19.99 for a manual that could tell me nothing.
I don’t like the email that was sent by Daniel mentioned above. Whether it is free software or not, they are providing service. There number one service should be customer service, because without the consumers they wouldn’t be making any money and no one would even know what opencart was.
It’s unfortunate if this is the level of customer service to be expected from them.

Wow, and to think this is still going(then again this isn’t the first site and probly won’t be the last to slander Open Cart, Daniel, the software or Qphoria). Found this while searching for something else, oh well. Been using OC 1.5.0.5 since the 7th of july and have had no issues with it. I guess I’m too simple to try and mess with custom templating or db editing. I also don’t use paypal for my transactions so I’m not worried there either. Paypal in itself is full of issues I’d rather not get into. I’m no programmer, but being in the computing industry 20+ years, I understand where Qphoria’s coming from and why him and Daniel treat everyone the way they do.

I had an issue towards the begining of the month where 1.5.0.5 wasn’t working right on my host(x10hosting) at the time. It wasn’t accepting the security token on login and was having me put in my admin name and password up to 8 times before it would take. The folks on the forums had suggested various versions to try and we ended up settling on 1.4.7 The problem I had was X10hosting decided to only allow so much viewing of the MySQL db, causing conflicts with the software. I’m now on godaddy where I have full acess to MySQL db and using OC 1.5.0.5 without any issues(and I mean none what so ever).

The forum rants I see are typical. People don’t use the search function to find their problem so they whine about it. The moderators snap back, and people whine some more so sites like this are made with comments like these that are yay long(and don’t ammount to anything). Only way I see not using Opencart would be if they decided tomorow to shut the whole thing down(and I wouldn’t blame them with the way people are these days).

“However, the update patch usually contains default template changes. Not only that, but the problem with this, is that if you have a custom template, you need to be very careful because the template changes go to the default folder, not the custom folder. In other words, if you have template changes your updates end up being very cumbersome and time consuming.”

People like you prevent the success of openSource. OpenSource is all about community. If you dont want that community, thats feel and there are litterally hundred of paid products which will give you a SLA your asking for.

I’m not going to start talking about people, Daniel , QPhoria and Whoever i communicate with is in anyway connected to my company, they are not in any way involved in my business, i cannot trust something as serious as my whole business to a unknown person.

As a user on the forums , i see frequently people who are looking for a boxed solution , sometimes people thing they have a right to demand things… dont kid yourself, the money made by the website is by no means close to the money that they would made selling such a solution directly.

now for the updates, i do agree it`s disappointing to not receive the functionality by the deadline but if you take the opencart announcements and just spread it to you costumers you’re the one doing it wrong. Once again they are not my employees , business partners or in directly related to my bussiness. When 1.5 i was tempted to announce my whole userbase, but i didn’t because it would be insane.

I will not defend or attack. I will just talk about my experience. I LOVE OpenCart. I love how it is very well supported in multiple language. I love their forums. I disagree with the claim that your posts will go unanswered. I rarely have seen an unasnwered post. Most of not all problems brought up are answered. I personally managed to find all my answers (silly “how did i not see that” to “help me NOW!!!”)

As one user rightly said. Other cart system are in their 6th year or so and they are still unstable.

BIG THANKS to all open source devs. a BIGGER and FATTER THANKS to opencart guys.

This is pretty sad. So many people making excuses for inexcusable behavior. When you put anything out to the public free or otherwise, you’d better have your emotions in check and if you are as easily irritated as the people supporting this cart then you need to just go sit down somewhere and play with Mr Potato head or something because you are an infant incapable of supporting a viable product or service to the public. If it’s really being released “as-is” then kill the forum and any way to contact you. Let users form their own forums and assume the responsibility. By creating and managing a support forum you are offering support and to not do so in a professional manner is unacceptable. There are many free programs floating around with no support forum, no release schedule and no way to contact the developer. People still use them and get updates whenever they are available. Those are clear examples of “here something cool, if you can use it, cool, if not, cheers!”. But somehow we are supposed to just accept a group of apathetic developers and moderators with thin skins and egos who are really too fragile to be providing anything to the public?

I don’t think so! If you are going to run and operate a support forum or imply even a little that you are supporting this cart then I suggest you drink a gallon of professionalism, grow up and support your work!

I’d rather there be no effort whatsoever to support something than there to be an “illusion” of support. You guys are like “yeah… we’ll support it if we feel like it.” or “Yeah… we’ll hype up the cart and our great releases when we want you to be hyped up with us for that moment.” Whatever. Grow up or disappear.

This blog is being truthful. The world can live without this cart, especially if it comes with shit throwers. …”wow, that’s a nice car!….oh and it’s free!….oh but when you take it back to the dealership for repair, the mechanic punches you…. yeah, I’ll pass.”

I’d rather pay money for a working cart with good support than a working free one with terrible support.

This is pretty much exactly what I think about it, and I’ve had the discussion about professionalism (or lack thereof) with Daniel and Qphoria on the forum a number of times. From memory, all of those discussions were deleted by i2Paq.

Like you’ve said, the fact that OpenCart is free does not, in any way, imply that you’re entitled to be spoken to harshly for asking simple questions or providing honest feedback. Regardless of anything to do with pricing models or support obligations, at a human level there should always be a level of respect (in both directions).

Sadly, the team — particularly Daniel — have a long way to go before they will win any respect from me. Qphoria is generally fairly helpful and will go out of his way to answer some questions, but generally only those that affect him personally, such as his own modules or OpenCart code that he has only just recently updated. Most other questions will receive the kind of response outlined in this original article. Sometimes the questions are repetitive, but have some common sense and understand that that will NEVER change. Go to any forum on earth, any office on earth, and you’ll see that there are always going to be lazy/uneducated people who will ask silly questions when the answers are freely available. But you know what? Replying with ‘You can find the answer here… (link)’ is just as easy as replying with ‘You’re a moron, get lost’. It’s really not that difficult to bite your tongue and demonstrate just a little patience. There’s absolutely no excuse for abusing people outright unless they’ve done the same to you (and even then, a better option would be to simply delete the post or respond privately).

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Daniel abuse people, some of them first-time users/posters, and he has often resorted to childish name-calling such as “idiot”, “moron”, or worse. From a user perspective this is terrible, but what about from the perspective of OpenCart? How can a product be ultimately successful, even if it’s free, when the users are being abused?

OpenCart is a fantastic product which ticks all of the boxes for me as a web designer/developer. However the support is extremely poor, and frankly that’s not good enough. Customer service is, at the end of the day, the number one factor in determining the success of a business. Daniel and co need to wake up to that fact sooner rather than later.

Famous quote: Statues are never erected of critics, critics are merely the pigeons that poop on the statues of great men.

Open cart is clean, easy to modify and has A TON of support available. In the few short months we have been using it I have already met three modification writers who are more than helpful and extremely knowledgeable, I have also had excellent support from daniel personally.

Modules and mods for open cart are cheap averaging at only $10 to $15 to add functionalities as required by clients.

Stop and think people!!! Think about the cost of developing an ecommerce system, hell think about the cost of running to scriptlance and having a custom mod written. A free clean ecommerce system, easy to mod, easy to skin and with a wealth of modules for next to nothing WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT????

Back to my famous quote, where’s your ecommerce platform websyn so we can compare the two???? What are your experiences on a development team how did you cope with the pressure? You don’t have one? You are not on a development team???

Well I tried OpenCart and was disappointed for a ton of reasons, although it has a promising future…if the team extends a bit. Daniel should really hire a guy from India to help !

Someone told me to try Concrete5, which is a very easy to use open source CMS. I love it after one hour. Was a bit reluctant to buy the $125 e-commerce addon they sell on http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/ecommerce/, but then I decided that support was important, and afterall if my client wants a good solution I can charge $125 more, it will spare me some headache… Their refund policy was a bit weird. But I did not have to use it.

Indeed I got a reply and the solution 5 hours after posting a request. Updates and patches are also made as soon as a flaw is discovered. So, bye opencart. Concrete5 is much better for small ecommerce. Although, for big ones, I’d go with magento.

I think the guy who posted this thread is too harsh ! I don’t know them in real life, Daniel and Qphoria
but here is the main point I believe will convince anyone
I’m a professional web developer, e-commerce, engineer.
1) They are goodhearted people
2) OC has a great number of follower
3) OC is goodlooking, sleek, fast, small size, more than enough basic functions
4) Chinese are generally smart-in this case: smart and good heart for Danile and Qphoria
5) OC is free !

Well, all I can say after only using Opencart for a few days, is that it is fairly easy to set up. But, I left osCommerce for lack of support, and I am feeling deja vu with Opencart. I asked two simple questions, two days ago, and no reply/help yet. If I get abused in the reply ( if I get one ), I will warn, you treat me like crap and I will return the attitude! I am no little kid here. You will talk to me with respect, or I will not hesitate to act in kind! We’ll see how this one turns out.
My big, and this is a very big one, is that there is no help in making a custom module. You have to buy them. There isn’t a module for what I need. I am not that proficient with PHP coding yet. So it would have been nice to have this feature in the set up, so I could add a custom module easily. Or at least a tutorial that doesn’t involve buying someone else’s add on and modding it to suit my needs.
The products I sell are made by me. I am not a re-seller.
After reading some of this, I am glad I have only added one product so far. If I have to pick up and move again, at least it will be easy on my brain.
A lack of real support, or staff acting rude ( As mentioned, you need to have a professional attitude! ), and no real tutorials won’t get you far with many merchants. I have to fire staff for being rude in the past, it’s just not acceptable.

Opencart is a great ecommerce platform and considering that it is free, it is more than OK for it to have some shortcomings in code or support. Code is written by humans and support is also given by humans, not machines.

I’m perfectly happy with it after having tried many ecommerce solutions both free and not. Just look at the prestashop code and see how messy it is. Opencart is clean. Look at the module prices at prestastore. Rip off !

I am not bashing them. So far, I am fairly happy over all. I had a few more questions, but I just dug deep and figured some of them on my own. I am a fairly intelligent man, so I can usually figure things out on my own. Not everyone can do that. I had a free site for over a year and offered free products to build a fan base, even with free products I stood behind those products. I read a few threads today, there is a lot of attitude in the support forum.
As I said, that doesn’t bother me, I can be just as nasty as the next guy. I just hope it never has to come to a font war in a forum. I sold my www war helmet years ago. LOL

Actually, I am now extremely sick of the lack of support in Opencart! When I have an issue with customers not getting the DL they bought in their Downnload Inbox, I am not happy. I posted this issue and there were 3 staff members on, twenty minutes later poof, gone. I still have no help on this one.
I am going to get stuck with a reverse transaction fee.
I didn’t start a store to give out money, I started it to make money.

Here is my opinion for what it’s worth. I have tried Presta it’s a tad more work but it does provide a good all round ecommerce site with the all important META TITLES which I find extraodinary that opencart do not provide except that is to say the Homepage where you can input meta titles.

I have spoken to a few webdesigner friends and they all say the same you need the meta titles … I am no seo expert this is an opinion based on what I have been led to believe.

Secondly the Forum attitude is a disgrace ,I posted on there once and got a reply about being melodramatic and not to put opencart down etc….. Needless to say I won’t waste my time posting on the forum again. Every poster is unique and has different levels of understanding. I am learning as I go along. So every poster should be treated with the utmost respect. if a question is repeated .. so what?? Just polietly quide the poster to the correct link to find the answer.

Apart from the lack of meta titles and disgraceful forum I enjoy using opencart for my ecommerce shop.
I have set up a presta shop and slowley working towards adding products when all is done I have the choice do I remain with opencart or not?

It costs nothing to be polite … I will happily donate something if Daniel would add meta titles , I know other users have done this so why can’t it be a implemented in the first place?

More importantly treat all opencart users with a tad respect and provide a forum where people are not afraid to ask those questions

My apologies in advance if any of these points are duplicates of what’s been said already – it’s a long thread and I’m not scanning it all. Suffice it to say the first ~20 posts pretty much give you the general idea of the discussion.

My personal, 2-cents, for-what-it’s-worth overview of OpenCart:

After going through about 20 different carts (Zen, Cube, X, etc), and rejecting them all for various reasons (dead project, outdated code, inflexible, etc), I finally found Magento. An awesome system – IF you’re a 100% fully competent LAMP programmer and/or you have a support team. It’s the “Swiss Army Chainsaw” of OSS carts. The problem is, it’s so bloody complicated and opaque that it took me about 4 months to find a semi-decent programmer who could take it on (after about 400 rejected ones). Still didn’t work out, so it took me the better part of a year to learn it enough to customize it in any significant way. So, A YEAR AND A HALF in development, it was coming along but was still a mess with many “mystery areas”. Anyone who has played around with Magento internals will know what I mean.

And then I found OpenCart. And now, less than 6 months later, I have a customized, fully functional, E-commerce website. For that, I thank the OC developers, and the authors of several extensions I used. Compared to the outdated mess of ZenCart, the ironclad-closed-source-ness of Bitrix, the lack of even the most basic features in Presta and Agora, etc etc, OpenCart does what I need – and it does it well enough that even a “marketing geek” with absolutely ZERO previous programming experience was able to build a web store.

Yes, the forums are dead silent sometimes. Several ways to compensate for that:

(a) plan your work in advance, and when you come to an area where you’re not sure how to proceed, and you do an experiment there, and you find out that you can’t get anywhere – post the question THEN, and go back to your main development timeline, so by the time you get to the problem area, there’s a chance someone has answered your question. Don’t expect an answer overnight.

(b) between Google and PHP forums, I bet 95% of OC-related questions can be answered without even hitting the OC site. WebMasterWorld has plenty of info on SEO, htaccess, and other “linky” topics. And so on.

(c) ask questions in relevant, specific ways, and provide details. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen a question, and it was one I’ve already encountered & solved – but the asker didn’t provide their OC version or any other relevant details. “How do I make URL’s look nice?” is NOT a good way to ask a question. Neither is “My product page is broken!”. I’m not going to ask for info, bookmark the thread, and then check back with it to see if that additional info has been provided. If you give me an ANSWERABLE question, and I can give you an answer “on the run” – I will! But don’t make me work for it. I’m doing you a favor, not the other way around.

(d) it may be an a-hole maneuver, but asking the same question in 2-4 different areas, appropriately rephrased, is a good way to get answers if you’ve ignored (a), (b), and (c), and really are in a hurry. Don’t spam though – there’s a difference between emergency measures and asking the same thing x20 versions 4 times a day.

hey Joe, thanks for the post. It is very unbiased~ Lets understand those OC guys just got their patience worn out by so many questions, and like you said 95% of the times if we do a little bit more work and preparation, it will be solved. It is important to have a good teacher, but so is preparation of the student.

what Joe Schmoe says is true. i had a similar experience. started with oscommerce, purchased a template, started to customise it (i had no experience), than droped after 6 months of work when i have sean the lacks it has compared with other platforms-have stumbled upon magento. so, abandoned the project, started working in magento. at the beginning all was fine, upgraded the new template with many addons and customised it again (took 1.3 years) than one day i decided to terminate it as well (i was done 95%). this was the result of the poor performance to load a simple page and the countless errors i had-have even tried 2 diferent housts to solve the problem but no luck. after this have looked again for a new platform and i found opencart. what can i say. from the start i loved it becouse i reseabled the magento in wich i spended so much time but had a huge performance in speed on the same host. purchased a new template and modified it again, added several modules and today i am finished, after 6 months.
the problem with all ecommerce platforms is that they are not stable and error free 100%. i would love to see a good platform wich is version let’s say 1 and has absolutley no errors. it is a myth. each developer tries to solve certain problems and by modify the files(to make the corrections) they introduce other errors.
it’s like someone on the magento forum said to the developers, by each version you corect some problems, others are left unsolved and you introduce as well other problems. i come to understand that this is so true….at least in magento and opencart. but i belive that this is the case with all of them

Quote From Adi “the problem with all ecommerce platforms is that they are not stable and error free 100%”

See, therein lies a huge issue! If the software is buggy and doesn’t work right, customers will go elsewhere. That’s flat out not good business. No matter how you look at it. Remember, when owning a business, the customer is always right. Even an online store! Customers have to trust you ( the owner ), and you ( the owner ) have to trust your software, and that software needs solid support. Even if it’s free.
Andre helped me solve my customer’s issue and it sort of worked out. The customer bailed, is bad-mouthing my shop, and that’s not good! I know what I was doing wrong and it’s fixed now, that’s good. Will my store over come this mangled bridge? Time will tell.
One big thing is that anytime you offer something to the public, even if it is free, you should be stand up about it and back what you offer. Not shove a stick up your ass and get all pissy when people have a complaint or ask for help. If you don’t want to back up what you offer, the don’t offer it! I have been lucky enough to have only had one wad be rude in the support forums, and I was actually nice enough to ask him to stop. You don’t know me, but I am not a nice person when you act like a stain to me.
As it stands, I am trying my best to stick it out with OpenCart. We shall see where this road leads.

After the exhaustive reading above (I really did read the whole thing), in short, may I humbly ask whether or not the current 1.5.3. version of OpenCart is safe to at least have a paypal standard or pro as a method of payment? The more I read about it in the official forum, the more I grit my teeth to the thought of going back to the drawing board, looking for the right platform.

Regardless if its free software or not, once you put something out in the public and expect thousands upon thousands of users to integrate that piece of software, the least you could do is to take security issues professionally, and to everyone who wrote it’s free and don’t criticise, you must be a one person shop selling something at the back of your garage. But as a developer, think about all those clients portfolio and sensitive details a shopping cart holds. Security is essential, not an option.

And that attitude is putting people at stake, their businesses, their customers, and there livelihoods. It’s a huge risk to take. Imagine you got a brick and motar store that sits pretty but you feel your’re gona get robbed in any second, whereas you have a not-so-pretty store but you’re safe and secure.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the cart (hence the issue, if not i would of moved on and quick) but the problem is not about the piece of fantastic software, it’s about the attitude and transparency about future security releases that’s timely. It’s a serious issue. If not a flaw in the team.

I would be the last person to disgrace Open cart. I am a person who tries and tests each software before actually using it. Somehow I found Opencart easier and also easier to manipulate. Just dont go against them. Free is Free. If you need your own version, use open cart and develop your own upgraded version for your use. (Yes, it is open source). Good luck.

“It would appear as though existing tracking cookies are not overwritten by subsequent visits from different affiliate links.

In other words, let’s say I visit the site via a tracking link from one affiliate. A cookie is set with that affiliate’s tracking code. I don’t buy anything, but a few days later I visit the same site via a tracking link from another affiliate (i.e. to a different product), and buy that product. The cookie remains set to the tracking code from the original affiliate, and the second affiliate – who actually generated the most recent visit to the product which was purchased – does not get credit for the referral.”

The reply I received:

“there is no bug! stop bothering me! its how you think something should work but you are wrong.”

OPENCART is free. Support is not compulsary. Though moderator and owner should not be close minded for the sake of opencart future. User suggestions must be SERIOUSLY considered. Dont abuse user or being SINISTER when replying to people!

anyway here is the solution for your oc problem:
1. have bugs,suggestion,modification request?
2. post on support forum
3. no support no reply?ok np
4. hire a coder @freelancer.com or anywhere in the world
5. abuse,mutilate opencart frame as much as u want.
6. PROBLEM SOLVED
7. REPEAT?

Many of you developers really, in my opinion, have a nerve. You’re charging your customers to develop an e-commerce website and yet you’re using a free open source shopping cart. And then you have the audacity to jump on Daniel and “Qphoria” because you don’t like their service or the tone of their responses. Well, then, pay for a cart and then you’ll be perfectly within the bounds of civility to complain to the developers if things aren’t working as you expected them to. Neither Daniel nor “Qphoria” are your slaves (working for you for nothing), and anything that you get from them you should consider to be a gift. What a bunch of cheapskates!

This has nothing to do with thinking Daniel or Qphoria are my slaves, but everything to do with the fact that they consistently demean their users and snub their noses at the very idea that there could possibly be even the slightest security issue within their software.

Until… comes 1.5.x… ugh, that thing is a mess. I can’t place anything anywhere. Time to learn new system are too damn high multiplied. I personally still use 1.4.9.6 and i think i’ll keep it as long as posible. For the devs, i think you should mantain the 1.4.x branch, scrap the 1.5.x. Make your money by creating original plugins.

Prestashop are far complex, have more feature, and nice. By standard, Prestashop is a “department store” while Opencart is a “boutique”.

Opencart truly is a work of brilliance… If your not such a good coder, and feel the need to install loads of extensions and modules instead of writing your own modifications, or need someone to explain to you how to do simple things, then it may be worth paying for a managed eCommerce solution… I personally have saved hundreds of hours of coding from using Opencart, and not paid a single penny for it.

Everything works perfectly out of the box and if there is something wrong there are more than enough answers on the internet without having to bug the person that spent god knows how much time creating this fantastic opensource product.

Every fucking module is for money.
You don’t get support for your modules.
You don’t get support on Opencart’s forum, you must learn whole system, how it works.
Admins ask money for answering on forum.

I am currently running v1.5.2.1. Features are removed and undocumented, incomplete mods are added and we are told to be thankful that it was added, never mind it isn’t complete and nobody bothers to document that incompleteness. Until a user brings it up then we all know but don’t dare tell them that or they will delete your posts and flame you.

I’ve seen many times were they say Daniel doesn’t like change and then in another post tell you to ask for a feature to be implemented. Yes it’s free but after you pay for all the mods you require it will cost you more than a paid cart would have cost. I’m so tired of the “it’s free so don’t complain” attitude so many people have. Nobody forces them to release this software publicly as open source, that’s a choice they make. And the oc team are far from perfect, but don’t dare suggest that or again you’ll be told that you don’t appreciate the free software.

Extension store is a joke! You can’t keep track of what you bought or what you downloaded and if you post a comment, forget about ever getting a reply unless you bookmark that page and return to it day after day after day to see if a reply was posted. I guess word press spoiled me with the ability to update my extensions directly inside the software. Nevertheless, extensions is where they make all their money so stop fooling yourselves into thinking this stuff is free. Point in case – There is a mod that will auto-post to twitter – Daniel commented that this is a wonderful addition and he’s even seen some stores get 6 extra sales a day from using this simple addition to opencart. Well then that should be priority number 1 to be part of the core right? As of version 1.5.2.1 it’s not part of the core and there are NO compatible extensions that will auto-post to twitter that will run on opencart v1.5.x!

The first two replies in this post are very typical of what you will encounter on the opencart forums. Attitude, justification, deleted posts and just plain ignored is the way they do things over there. It’s a community of folks that have become tired of playing the same old song over and over again.

They are going to keep version 1.6 secret? Hahaha what a joke! I was in the middle of launching a new opencart when with no notice a new version was released with very sparse documentation and empty promises of a document that would explain what to expect from this new version.

Think you can buy a book to help you out? Think again, they don’t bother updating the main site ever so it still shows books for version 1.4 when there are several other books available for 1.5 that aren’t even on the main site – good luck finding them on your own! I imagine these folks were banned by opencart and that’s why their products aren’t being sold on the site directly.

It’s a great product, but so many mods should be core and the fact that they never make it spells it out for any doubters. Opencart is far from free software. It would have been cheaper to purchase commercial software that comes with what you need in the box not as an add-on (third party no less). Had I known this before inventing 3 months time into building this site I would have opted for something else.

Save your money and sanity and go somewhere where you will be treated as an entrepreneur and not a grade school child.

PS: I emailed the mod to do a custom programming job for me and never got a reply.

I was about to use opencart for a project until I saw the ridiculously unprofessional posts on various blogs from Daniel. The guy has absolutely no idea how to run a business and should not be allowed to talk to the public. Don’t let your clients anywhere near this fool!

I moved from PrestaShop because the modules are so expensive, but at least I had support and there was also a module that is on OC that I wanted. Well I paid $160 for the module and get no support from the developer! I can’t understand how they can charge that and not give a [censored] about their customer. Other than that I’m very happy with OC.

I think opencart is good at front end and admin panel usage. But i think the codes are written in a terrible way. There are many repetitive code in controllers/viewsetc. that can easily be run in single loop. Another issue is the low quality framework that opencart runs on. I am a MVC framework developer too and i use my own framework. Maybe it hasnt many features as a frameworklike Yii etc. but i think its much better than the coding style and folder structure used in opencart. Somebody should tell the opencart developers that: a collection of php/html files (that needs to be copied to many folders in opencart root directory) can never be called a module. A module should simply be contained in a single folder that can easily be added to a directory in opencart (ie. modules/ ). The contribution is not in an elegant way for this reason. As a conclusion i must say that the idea about opencart and ui used both at frontend and backend is well but the coding style is terrible for contributors.

I am a self taught html user.
Built my own webiste.
But needed a cart
Decided on Opencart.
Go it up and running sort of.
But my main problem is the complete lack of documentation.
The ebook that woman tries to sell is just Opencarts parse documentation with a few pretty graphics
Eg two pages on how the layout system works ! – Come on.

I think a lot of Daniel and Qphorias problems would go away if they got a freelancer to write a decent user manual or started a wikipedia that we could all contribute to.

The real questions are
Is Opencart aimed at developers ?
Or at amatuer webmasters wanting their own site ?

We here at KG Karaoke must take issue with this article because, frankly, it’s unfair.
Yeas, Daniel makes promises as to dates and often doesn’t keep them, but he’s far from being alone in this regard. This is very common among software writers, and it’s because they’re artisans, and as such they tend to be quite individualistic, and even resistant to suggestions. Being determines consciousness.

Opencart is free, and as such its users need to be somewhat more reserved in making demands of Daniel. He’s given the world probably the best ecommerce software out there, and he should be appreciated for having done so. Yes, if you want to sell addons to OpenCart you’ll have to pay him a 20% commission. He’s the inventor.

So you’ll likely have to purchase new addons to migrate from 1.4 to 1.5? Daniel’s under no obligation to make his software upwards compatible for all addons, and many programs out there fall under the exact same category. There’s a script available to upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5, so all’s not lost.

There was a time when it cost around a thousand dollars to purchase a shopping cart that does less than OpenCart, and these companies surely must be taking a big hit in sales.

What we find incredible, is the position taken by website developers that whie it’s okay for them to charge a company to setup an ecommerce website using OpenCart, it’s not okay for Daniel to charge those who produce addons. What a bunch of tightwads!

We might add that Qphoria has been extremely helpful to us. When we had a problem with a UPS module that we’d purchased, he got back to our email in less than fifteen minutes. We both agreed that there was a bug, and he sent us a modified copy within minutes.

We use OpenCart on two of our websites and find it to be excellent. And yes, we believe that people should read the Readme files before hiring-off emails.

I had migrated from OpenCart to hosted BigCommerce. Actually I had used Cart2Cart service for that purpose to avoid manual data transferee. So what can I say, yes, it is better, even if I pay money for it. But To OpenCart protection, I have to said, that is not so bad. Even now, I see the big future for OpenCart

You guys release 1.5.1.3 apparently without even testing the PayPal Standard module. As supplied, it doesn’t pass address information because you left out the line supplying the state. We have corrected this problem, though the phone number still isn’t passed to PayPal (as in the early versions of 1.4.X.X).

This isn’r “free” as you so succulently put it, as you make 20% on all the addons, some of which merely replace the functions that were removed from 1.4.X.X .

The basic problem isn’t the cost of the add-ons, but the sloppy oversights that are being made. Apparently you guys write the code and frelease it, letting your clients figure out the fixes.

How come when a new customer registers, the store owner’s email simply says that someone has registered? WHO? You guys have been hounded about this for many months, yet you’ve done nothing about it.

Just remember that if OpenCart is eventually rejected by the website developers, then your “Extensions” will no loger be needed, and Daniel’s China venture may prove to be quite a drain on his dwindling bank account.

The purpose of a shopping cart is to sell products online, and the purpose of selling products is to make money. The more people who visit your website through a search engine, the greater your number of sales will be. So why is it that OpenCart does so lousy when it comes to being search engine friendly?

Well for one thing, whoever came up with the Related Products feature doesn’t understand how search engines operate. Search engines, you see, ignore the TABS on OpenCart’s product pages, so any Related Products get picked-up by the search engines regardless of where they may appear. You search for Widget123 and get several listings, such as Widget123 (if you’re lucky), Widget246, Widget 999, etc. This is very confusing to would-be customers, and quite taxing on the search engines that are surely going to get “sick and tired” of this. Indeed, it’s easy to pickout an OpenCart website merely by examining the multiple Google listings.

Then there are those horrible urls such as http://www.myopencartstore.com/Ajax Corp/Widgets/Widget123, but Daniel poo-poos this, arguing that he includes the rel=”canonical” Band Aid, even though this bleeds page rankings as do 301s.

Now don’t get this wrong. Don’t use Related Products and install “Pretty Damn Sexy” 1 & 3 extensions and your URLs will be excellent. But don’t tell Daniel about this, or he’s likely to suffer a stroke.

I am not new to selling online, haven sold multi-millions of dollars of goods since I opened my first ecommerce site back in the Summer of 1996. Since then I have made use of nearly a dozen different shopping carts, everything from custom coded cgi scripts to commercial products like x-cart and freeware solutions such as zen cart.

Recently I was looking to launch a new site, and thought I’d look into Opencart since I had never used it. During my research I found good reviews of the software itself, and absolutely horrid reviews blasting the developers. But surely this would have not affect on me, as I’m a professional and more than likely those saying the bad things about the developers are probably the ‘problem few’ you’ll find in any crowd.

Well…

I started looking though posts in the forum where users are supposed to be able to ask questions. Time and time again I was shocked at the arrogant, abusive way the developers responded to their users. This was in total contract to my experience and how I have seen users treated in other shopping cart forums, such as those for Zen Cart where fellow users and the developers are friendly and courteous.

In one thread a user asked for assistance with a simple task, to which a developer replied “lol really?! if you can use the toilet by yourself you should be able to” do this. Quphoria posted this comment.

Replies like this are all to common and happen daily. What benefit can the developers derive by belittling, berating and humiliating their users?

Then there’s this: Nothing is more important for a commercial site than security. And a cart that is not secure has no place online. Period.

When I started looking into Opencart’s security I found several discussions online where people had said that the Opencart team was extremely hostile towards anyone who brought up security issues. I thought this very strange as the last shopping cart I was using, Zen Cart, went out of their way to fix even very remote POTENTIAL security breaches and often thanked the users who pointed these weaknesses out to them.

Daniel, the developer himself, blew a gasket at this user and went off on a tirade about how the author was “wasting peopels time” by asking questions about security! What!!!

To which another user quoted Daniel’s reply “your wasting peopels time” and wrote “Cannot think of anything I disagree more with.”

I then added my own comment about how important security is for a shopping cart platform, and if it is not currently at the forefront of the developer’s minds, then perhaps it should be.

A very simple statement that is in no way harmful or derogatory.

Well today I got an email saying that there was a reply to my post. But when I clicked the link that took me to the above quoted thread I was shocked to find that the original author’s post, along with my post, have been deleted!

Additionally, when I try to login to the forum, I get a message saying I have been “permanently banned”!!
(kind of funny seeing as how I work for an ISP and have countless IPs available to create a new account with, but after this WHY would I want to???)

Here I was about to open a site using Opencart, and had already contracted with several ‘module’ developers to develop custom modules for me and another to maintain the site and apply security patches.

Had I actually purchased the modules they would all be facing chargebacks.

Needless to say I have totally changed my mind about using Opencart for this or any other project. To have the developers themselves delete posts that in any way question their software is totally unbelievable.

To be banned from their forum for simply stating that you feel that a prime focus for Opencart developers should be security is unbelievable.

To use a software where the developers obviously do not care about security and find it to be a cumbersome triviality is plain unacceptable.

I would not be surprised in the least if Opencart users didn’t find themselves being audited for PCI compliance issues due to the developers aberrant attitude toward security. Believe me, I’ve been in this business long enough to know – it’s bound to be noticed.

@MyOC Very curious what software you are using at the moment and what your experiences are with other software companies/developers.

We use Joomla – VM but I’m looking around what more there is in the world. Opencart looks great and the workflow in these websites is very nice. The problems reported on this website however are shocking to say the least.

My main concern in our website is the security. We don’t even use a login for customers since “what you don’t have can’t be stolen”. With this in mind I am looking for an “all-in-one” solution like Magento but without the huge demands on knowledge and hardware.

I thought Opencart could be this lightweight Magento version and in some way I see that it is. With Magento you get no support at all unless you pay a half years salary, with Opencart you get scolded for free. How sad!

Yes, the attitude of Daniel and “QPhoria” could be improved. Yes you need to repeat, repeat, repeat…and you guessed it ..repeat again!! Then start getting ready to start a new session of repeating! Also sometimes is better not to answer rather than answer in a bad way! The solution may be to find a way and make the community more supportive between members.

Opencart isn’t that bad as software! Its fairly reliable and add-ons are not expensive like in PrestaShop.

I like zen-cart because nearly everything is free, and the community do help each-other a lot more than in OpenCart. I don’t know why this is…. I don’t remember ever being helped in the Opencart forum, I had to work it out on my own. Most of the add-on developers try their best to help , but there are also bad apples. I have spent well over $400 in extensions in opencart and $0 in zen-cart so far.

I’m not too sure about PrestaShop because everything is so expensive! It has some cool features like the automatic download-install, it works more or less like a web browser like chrome where you can add plugins easy.

I like Magento a lot because it is trusted by so many big brand names, multinational companies, and even president obama’s website runs on it! However it is very heavy on the server! I think it is more for large business with professional in-house support. So far the eCommerce jobs i have come across… 70% of them ask for Magento, and the other 30% ask either VirtueMart or oscommerce. But I don’t like it because it has that “Enterprise Edition” option!!

Oscommerce is where everything started started but it feels a bit abandoned! I have it installed in my development server, but I have never bothered too much with it.

I have tried a few others like eclime, which looked to have great potential a couple of years ago, but it never picked up any momentum. Another interesting one and very new is tomatocart. It is very new but it seems to be growing!!

It amazes me sometimes how some people completely misunderstand how open source works…

It is obvious that those who complain relentlessly, as I have seen on this blog and in the comments, fall squarely into that very group.

Open Source Software is software that someone, or group of people, developed to fulfill their specific needs…then decided to share their hard work with others in order to save them from having to “reinvent the wheel”.

Open Source Software is free, as in “free speech”, not “free beer”. If the developer’s decided to make it free, as in “free beer”, then where the #$%& do you get off complaining about the software. You have the source code FFS…if it doesn’t work the way you want it to, its because you haven’t fixed it yet!

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If you post anything in OpenCart forums that Daniel or his Qphoria sidekick deem overly critical of OpenCart, either directly or by implication, you will bne “permanently banned” from the OpenCart forums. They display a special dislike towards those whose contributions tend to upstage their expertise regarding OpenCart, and one of the quickest ways to get banned is to become too well known when it comes to offering improvements to OpenCart that point out its shortcomings, or furnish instructions detailing modifications that are not to their liking.

OpenCart is probably the best out there, but it should, nonetheless, be viewed as a prototype that begs for improvement, something that Daniel and his sidekick are quite reluctant to accept. OpenCart is no longer a “community.” It has morphed into a for-profit business, with Daniel making his money by charging developers twenty-percent of their sales through the OpenCart website.

Told them that the theme download has a replicating virus, I got shot an email from Daniel Kerr-> “idiot! learn to use a computer!” This project won’t last, these are not people person, they sit at their computer doing who know what… I guess he also uses blueyon@gmail.com and webmaster@opencart.com because it is in the email header:

Me having a problem too. I have a free extension for opencart and planning to make more, and i asked something to daniel with email, for multi store, since there was no documentation for it, and because i thought the way he checks for multistore (in index.php) and generally putting many things in index.php eas not the best way for an mvc model and programming structure. He just answered me “other people got it working, hire a developer”. What an asshole!!!!!

I agree, I rely on existing users for help. The current situation does lend itself to someone making a lot of money offering support and letting the opencart developers go hungry. It is the problem with the real techies, once they have created it they get bored and go off and do something else.

You are very arrogant with its users, and whenever there’s an update I have problems, I’m seriously thinking about switching to magento to be much more professional and no arrogant people there …
OpenCart seems more like child’s play ….

2013/2/9 Daniel Kerr
why don;t you send an email like a normal person instead of using the reporting system!

Please do not use opencart, its better to use magento as they have good customer support. Opencart support team consists of a bunch of assholes . When people will avoid using opencart than that bastard Danel Kerr will learn a lesson and some manners to deal with his customers.

Ah well, I like a bit of personality
At least they are genuine. The OpenCart team expects you to have a few neurons and I really do like that.
They are ready to help IF you show some clear signs of intelligence.

Randi Jones’s example just above is self explanatory: he may be complaining but his requests are unclear, he uses the wrong channel, doesn’t understand what Daniel Kerr is saying to him, makes a stupid threat to switch with Magento…
All this for time wasting trivialities…
When you get hundreds of support requests like that one, as an admin you do get sudden bursts of shotgun envy.

I prefer OpenCart’s ways to the vaseline-with-a-smile attitude of quite a few support teams in the proprietary universe.
“Have you tried olive oil? Don’t forget the carrots, Have a nice day, Sir”… you know the kind.

For an Opensource I think Opencart is super user friendly and coming from a web development background, I think Opencart is getting better. For those who do not like OpenCart, I have a question, It is obvious why you choose OpenCart, would you choose another like Magento? OpenCart is light weight and very easy for those who do not really understand how it works. If you have any questions ask at the forum, I am sure there are millions of use willing to give you an answer.

For Qphoria, If you guys need a project manager, let me know, I am happy to help.

I love OpenCart, but I agree the documentation sucks. So rather than sit and complain about it, I’ve set up a new web forum http://opencartwiki.co.uk. Things are kind of quiet around there right now as it’s only just been set up, but I really hope that people will start joining and helping each other out. In the spirit of open source software, it’s completely free and I earn nothing from it at all. It’s purely there to help users of OpenCart out when they need it.

Hi I just started using OpenCrat – yep its a little rough, but I am a VP of R&D with over 200 engineers working on other products and I am using this as an internal shop tool to manage my SKU’s, instead of trying to ask the paid idiots in IT running Salesforce who cannot do anything and we pay salesroces a lot of money !!!

So to all you “whinners” out there shut the heck up, I for one am very impressed with open cart..as a two man shop…..I also thanks MrSmiley for starting this thread.

The NET is these complaints are nothing NEW.

Now I would change the open cart business model as I think the founders will run into trouble if they keep this up.

I am it is not fair to say something bad on a software. In fact everything has its good side and bad side but I think the good side is more than the bad side in oepncart. I really think opencart is very user friendly for us to use and manage/build up a e shop
Although there are many choice for me available on the internet but I still choose opencart as it is really user friendly compared to some other software

Also, opencart is now developed to 1.5.6.1 now, the function is even powerful than 1.4.x, so i will also recommend my friend to use it instead of abandon it

What is ecommerce cms/engine you are using now? I’m also in process creating my own ecommerce engine. My First step is creating the php framework, and it’s already done. I’ll take a lot the idea from opencart, since it’s the only MVC ecommerce engine i ever know.